The schools of Shanghai-China
finished first in math, reading and science. Hong
Kong-China was third in math and science. Singapore, a
city-state dominated by overseas Chinese, was second in
math, fourth in
science.

And the U.S.A.? America ranked 14th
in reading, 17th in
science and 25th in
math, producing the familiar quack-quack.

"This is an
absolute
wake-up call for America," said Education
Secretary
Arne Duncan.
"We have to face the brutal truth. We have to get much
more serious about investment in education."

But the
"brutal truth"
is that we invest more per pupil than any other country
save Luxembourg, and we are broke. And a closer look at
the PISA scores reveals some unacknowledged truths.

True, East Asians—Chinese,
Koreans,
Japanese—are turning in the top scores in all three
categories, followed by the Europeans, Canadians,
Australians and New Zealanders.

But, looking down the New York
Times list of the top 30 nations, one finds not a single
Latin American nation, not a single African nation,
not a single Muslim nation, not a single South or
Southeast Asian nation (save Singapore), not a single
nation of the old Soviet Union except
Latvia and
Estonia.

And in Europe as in Asia, the
northern countries (Finland, Norway, Belgium, Iceland,
Austria, Germany) outscore the southern (Greece, Italy,
Portugal). Slovenia and Croatia, formerly of the
Habsburg Empire, outperformed Albania and Serbia, which
spent centuries under Turkish rule.

Among the OECD members, the most
developed 34 nations on earth, Mexico, principal feeder
nation for U.S. schools, came in dead last in reading.

Asian-Americans outperform all
Asian students except for Shanghai-Chinese.

White Americans outperform students
from all 37 predominantly white nations except Finns,
and U.S. Hispanics outperformed the students of all
eight Latin American countries that participated in the
tests.

African-American kids would have
outscored the students of any sub-Saharan African
country that took the test (none did) and did outperform
the only black country to participate,
Trinidad and Tobago, by 25 points.

America's public schools, then, are
not abject failures.

They are educating immigrants and
their descendants to outperform the kinfolk their
parents or ancestors left behind when they came to
America. America's schools are improving the academic
performance of all Americans above what it would have
been had they not come to America.

The gap between the test scores of
East Asian and European nations and those of Latin
America and African nations mirrors the gap between
Asian and white students in the U.S. and black and
Hispanic students in the U.S.

"To be grossly politically incorrect, most of America's educational woes
vanish if these indifferent, troublesome students left
when they had absorbed as much as they were going to
learn and were replaced by learning-hungry students from
Korea, Japan, India, Russia, Africa and the Caribbean."

Weissberg contends that 80 percent
of a school's success depends on two factors: the
cognitive ability of the child and the
disposition he brings to class—not on texts,
teachers or classroom size.